I’d seen a post or two of people using Google Plus and getting their accounts suspended, but this morning I woke up to this article which compliles a lot of them, and points out a disturbing trend – that if you try to obscure your personal information in G+, you can get banned for it.

And not just banned, but you can lose all Google services.

I didn’t really care about G+ – it was interesting, I enjoyed seeing what was going on there, even if it’s a little strange to me. (I do not use Facebook, though I have an account. An IRL account, not a Warcraft account.) But I do care about my gmail account, and my youtube channel – I don’t think I have all of the source files for those videos anymore, and I’d hate to lose them.

So, since pseudonyms seem to be a risk for one’s entire Google account, I deleted G+.

In retrospect I shouldn’t have said “I’m leaving because I use a psuedonym and don’t want you shutting down my entire google account” in the “why are you leaving?” form, but … hey. I did. Whoops.

It’s pretty sad when you start feeling afraid of a company which promises to do no evil.

Am reconsidering my relationship with google now, which makes me a little sad. They’re a good company with some great products… but I don’t like companies who scare me with their policy decisions.

I’m not trying to lead a crusade against them. Lots of people will no doubt have no problems with staying on G+, and I’m really fine with that. But my separation of Cyn/not-Cyn needs to hold, and I’m not going to use it in public with my real name.

4 responses to “On Why I Left Google Plus”

What’s confusing is that they have no unified naming policy, in spite of having cross-service accounts. The YouTube policy – http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=151655 – has no requirement to use a person’s legal entity name – indeed, it encourages users to “be creative”.Facebook has never welcomed “non-persons”, such as Second Life identities or gnomes – anything that isn’t Firstname Lastname living in a location on planet Earth is inherently risky. Google didn’t care until it decided to try and clone Facebook…

Yes, I was thinking along the same lines once I saw the articles yesterday. I think I too will need to delete my account. Well, I’ll be deleting my Google+ wow account but I’m keeping my normal one.I don’t see this as something evil that Google did. They’re simply not out to replace Twitter’s anonymity which leaves Twitter as the best mean of communication for people who still desire to keep their identity hidden. To me, Google+ is simply a better version of Facebook. It will mean that I won’t be using it nearly as much as I was hoping but it doesn’t mean the company is evil for asking us to use our real identities. It’s a requirement of their product and we can decide to use it or not. In my case, it probably means not, or at least not to keep in touch with my wow people.

Thanks for posting this – it led me to deleting my Google+ account as well. (And I also mentioned “I wanted to use a pseudonym but didn’t want my entire Google account to get nuked” into the “Why’d you leave” box. Er.)I don’t want to pull down the barrier between my online identity and my RL identity (which is why I also use WoW’s RealID very little) – and I can’t afford to have my entire Google account shut down, as I have too many things associated with it including the PayPal account my job pays me through. So yeah.Pity, though. It looked interesting, but the “no pseudonyms” thing is a complete dealbreaker.

I don’t understand what difference it makes to Google or Facebook what you use as a user name. A user is a user isn’t it?My guild has a Facebook page but since I don’t do Facebook anymore I don’t have access to it. What would be the harm in creating an account based on my main? Most of my guildies know who I am and where I live in RL and several have my phone number. What I don’t want is people wanting to be my friend that I barely remember from High School or wherever. It should be my choice as to who and how I want to network.

About CWM

Cynwise's Warcraft Manual is a weblog about many facets of the World of Warcraft: PvP battlegrounds, digital avatars, warlock theory, and having fun with alternate play styles are common topics.